Word: limelighter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...openness of mind displays itself on many levels, from ESP experiments funded indirectly by the U.S. Government to the weeping throngs of California 13-year-olds getting blissed-out by the latest child guru off a chartered jet from Bombay. The acupuncturist now shares the limelight with Marcus Welby, M.D., and his needles are seen to work?nobody knows why. However, with Castaneda's increasing fame have come increasing doubts. Don Juan has no other verifiable witness, and Juan Matus is nearly as common a name among the Yaqui Indians as John Smith farther north. Is Castaneda real...
...awkward nostalgia Limelight elicits stems partly from its semi-autobiographical stance. Chaplin plays Calvero, an old vaudeville comedian who drinks too much and can't find work. He rescues a suicidal young ballerina (Claire Bloom) and infuses her with his life energy and accumulated wisdom. She becomes a great star; she falls in love with him; he dies...
...LIMELIGHT IS A sad, very sad movie. Sad in miniscule degree because it tries to tell an unhappy story, but sad mainly because Chaplin's former greatness winks from behind the bathos just often enough to let us recognize an artist trapped by his own sentiment. The film would be easier to dismiss had a lesser man made it, but Chaplin, twenty years past his prime, keeps reminding us of his earlier films--not of the Little Tramp he used to play but of the range of emotion his skilled movements could bring forth and of the warmth...
Chaplin directed Limelight, wrote the script and wrote the music, as he did for all his films. Soon after its release, in 1952, the American Legion and Howard Hughes fought to have Limelight, removed from the theaters: Chaplin, they argued, was un American. Only a few theaters actually cancelled the film, but it has rarely been shown since its initial release...
...GREATEST disappointment, however, is that the indigent dialogue alone forms the core of the film. Chaplin helped develop motion pictures. He was both champion and master of movement within the frame, yet Limelight is a static film. In 1931, Chaplin wrote, "The sudden arrival of dialogue in motion pictures is causing many of our actors to forget the elementals of the art of acting." He made both City Lights and Modern Times out of mime and motion in the 30's, when everyone else was making talking pictures, and he later made two films where dialogue was carefully integrated with...